Reform wants to frame the local elections as a referendum on other parties, and is urging voters to reject the governing Labour nationally, and the Conservatives locally.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want a political party that \u2026 is not afraid to stand up for British values and for common sense,\u201d Harris says. \u201cEssex will speak loud and clear for the rest of the country that Reform is here.\u201d<\/p>\n
That message was echoed by Glen Smith, chair of Reform\u2019s Witham branch, further north in Essex. \u201cThere\u2019s no national leadership,\u201d Smith says of Labour. \u201cPeople are reaching the point where, actually, they just feel that they don\u2019t know what to do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reform backs \u201calarm clock Britain\u201d who \u201cwant to take their kids on holiday and they want to have a good life,\u201d he argues. \u201cAnd they\u2019re working, they\u2019re pedaling as hard as you can to achieve that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Think before you vote\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reform\u2019s opponents, however, say Farage is selling a myth. The Conservatives want to lean on what they see as a strong local record \u2014 but still fear the national picture will affect the results.<\/p>\n
Shadow Housing Secretary James Cleverly, an MP since 2015 and a former Tory leadership hopeful, admits \u201cthere\u2019s still some residual frustration from our time in government,\u201d but says \u201cit\u2019s diminishing, and diminishing fairly quickly.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reform wants to frame the local elections as a referendum on other parties, and is urging voters to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1431,497,1355,5245,710,1360,173,401,5246,94,186,95,613,3807,5247,5248,5249,3880,285,5,6,5250,2067],"class_list":{"0":"post-10993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"tag-boris-johnson","9":"tag-british-politics","10":"tag-buildings","11":"tag-demographics","12":"tag-development","13":"tag-elections","14":"tag-england","15":"tag-history","16":"tag-james-cleverly-mp","17":"tag-keir-starmer","18":"tag-kemi-badenoch","19":"tag-nigel-farage","20":"tag-opinion","21":"tag-poll","22":"tag-priti-patel","23":"tag-referendum","24":"tag-richard-holden","25":"tag-tanks","26":"tag-transport","27":"tag-uk","28":"tag-united-kingdom","29":"tag-vaccines","30":"tag-westminster-bubble"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116379974559074465","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}